Talk:τόξον

Etymology

Etymology: Pre-Greek is a hypthetical language, he's not simply arguing for before Greek

It’s still a lowercase pre-Greek. It’s the same as with proto languages, such as proto-Elamite and proto-Doric. —Stephen 18:16, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Every source which I've ever seen treats it as a single language name, with capitalization on the P. I can't figure out how to link to Beekes' site (url is too long), but the 'pedia page seems to agree. Additionally, {{proto}} seems to capitalize the p in "proto". -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 18:35, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

As good as Wikipedia is, it’s the pits when it comes to capitalization. You can’t depend on anything you see there as far as capitalization goes. It is very common among English speakers to capitalize all sorts of things that should not be capitalized, or hyphenate what should not be hyphenated, or run together what should be hyphenated. All of the print dictionaries and encyclopedias that I’ve ever owned, such as the Random House, do not capitalize pre- or proto-. —Stephen 18:43, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Ok, but it appears that Beekes is capitalizing it. Check this out. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 18:47, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

He also uses hyphens where he should have dashes, and he writes "pre-hellenic" instead of pre-Hellenic. It is very common to find capitalization and punctuation errors in papers such as this. Until about 1990, serious works were handed over to professional typographers, who had the job of fixing capitalization and punctuation. Since then, the art is in freefall. —Stephen 18:57, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Ok, conceded. Would you be willing to try and find me a link to an article on the capitalization of such prefixes. While I do share your desire to keep the text of Wiktionary in a highly polished and correct state, I guess I've never heard of this particular rule. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 19:12, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

I think it would be very hard to find anything online. If you can find a print copy of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, you’ll find in it proto-Doric, proto-Elamite, proto-Ionic, as well as pre-Hellenic, pre-German, pre-Georgian, pre-Gothic, pre-Hebrew, pre-Malay, and many others.

The Random House is an American-English dictionary. It’s quite possible that the British do capitalize like Beekes. I know that Americans usually do not hyphenate pre-, anti- or non- words (preschool, antitank, nonpartisan) unless the second part is capitalized (non-American), while the British seem to like the hyphens everywhere...so proto-/Proto- could be a similar cross-pond difference. —Stephen 19:38, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

The use of this entry in its current formulation as a source caused me to downgrade one of my student's papers considerably. The simple fact is that it is no more likely that the Greeks borrowed this word from the Persians than that the Persians borrowed it from the Greeks. Bows exist in S. Europe from at least 10,000 BCE. The cognates in Greek, Latin and Persian are almost certainly PIE. Looking through a small group of your editors has added the same notation, "possibly derived from Persian," for words for items in common use among PIE people before there was any such thing as Greek or Persian. A small group of editors has engaged in some fairly hackneyed etymology of simply looking for cognates and adding this absurd claim and consequently made "wiktionary" a very poor source for many Latin or Greek origin words.

The etymology says that it is possibly borrowed from Persian. It also says, on the other hand, that it might be a cognate of Latin taxus (which implies that it could have come directly from PIE and not borrowed from another language). When we finish the Persian term, it will probably say that it is possibly borrowed from Greek. For your other accusations, you need to specify the words if you want us to consider what you say. —Stephen ^(Talk) 21:52, 14 November 2013 (UTC)